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PC optimizing for faster performance

Ok, I just went out and bought IL2 Sturmovic and this sucker just HOGS my PC of resources! I'm going to try to get the pc to perform better with what I have until I can get my memory upgrade (running 128 meg RDRAM now) I also have problems running NASCAR 4 on occaision (game stalls temporarily)

What can you suggest doing in the meantime to free up some system resources? I am currently using End It All, and am going to get REGCLEAN and CACHEMAN installed later today. Is there anything else you can think of to help with faster performance?

my first suggestion is to uninstall all that crap tune-up ware. They all hog resources. Run a lean and mean machine for the time being. Stop all unecessary programs from loading at startup (and you dont need a program to do that), set your swapfile at 384 both min and max and disable all effects. This will help until you get more memory.

WOW, thanks for the advise (and the laughs ) I've heard bad things about ME, but nothing like this lol.

Anyway, I did remove several apps that were running on startup, and it helped a LOT, but there's still a lot of stuff that I don't know what it is or what it does, I was scared I would delete something I DO need, so I just left a lot of stuff.

More memory, faster card, faster CPU is what you're going to need for the new games coming out.

Basic stuff you can do in the meantime;

Clean install of ME on a wiped drive. Also update Windows at Windows Update.

Latest mobo and video card drivers installed. DX 8.1. etc...

Press ALT control delete and see what's currently running and see what you want and don't want running in the background.

Under RUN type in msconfig, look at startup and see what's starting with Windows and see what you want and don't want. All you need technically for Windows to run if i recall is Explorer and systray.

In your BIOS knock your memory CAS down to their lowest timings, do each setting at a time and reboot and test.

AGP port on Turbo

Set a large AGP aperture. You don't have alot of physical RAM so don't get too carried away. Try 64 megs. If you had 512 megs of ram i'd say set it to 256 megs, I like to set the aperture as large as I can on systems. Some cards/boards(BIOS) are flakey with a large AGP aperture.

Make sure your hard drive is in DMA mode

Set your VM to a fixed size since you're running ME, see the other thread. I would set it at around a gig or more since you only have 128 megs of physical ram.

An optional step;

go to RUN type in

system.ini

open it and scroll down to where it says;

[386Enh]

And below it add;

ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1

Save and reboot. This forces Windows to read from your physical memory not your VM. It will only go to the VM when it's out of physical memory. The way ME works by default is it always uses VM no matter how much memory you have. Vm is slower because it's your hard disk instead of physical ram which is faster.

Originally posted by netdude An optional step;
go to RUN type in
system.ini
open it and scroll down to where it says;
[386Enh]
And below it add;
ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1
Save and reboot. This forces Windows to read from your physical memory not your VM. It will only go to the VM when it's out of physical memory. The way ME works by default is it always uses VM no matter how much memory you have. Vm is slower because it's your hard disk instead of physical ram which is faster.

That's interesting. I think I'll try this step. I don't understand what you mean by AGP aperture so I think I'll skip that part...I'd rather be slow than dead in the water and having to reformat or something. I will try most of the other stuff though, sounds easy enough.

I really do appreciate the advice, and I'll save your response for future reference in case i get brave one day

BTW, I just sold my gun, so I got money now. A brand new GeForce4 is as good as mine !!

when I tried to run warcraft3 on my cranky celeron 466, i used powerstrip to overclock my graphics card. Helped some. I normally just put my AGP aperture (at CMOS) to 1/4 of my physical RAM. Works best that way to me.

Finally, get rid all your screen saver and wall paper. I will help A LOT with your sort of memory capacity.